Patrick J. Volkerding announced the first release candidate of Slackware 12 in the current changelog. This will be the first Slackware release with a kernel from the 2.6 tree (2.6.21.5) as default. "It's that time again, and here we have Slackware 12.0 release candidate 1! If we're lucky, we got it all right the first time. Big thanks to the crew."

Slackware had always been a rock-solid distribution and I thank the project for making me learn more about Unix/Linux than anything else when I started using it in the mid-90's.

The problem I have now is that some of the projects I'd like to employ (Samba/LDAP, 802.1x for WiFi Authentication) do require, in some funny way, PAM to be available.

I understand Patrick's reasoning behind not including it - but that reasoning is now dated since all major distributions, including Gentoo, are using PAM - as do the BSD's, and the security ramifications are mostly to do with how other projects integrate with PAM, not the PAM implementation itself.

With all due respect to Patrick and the project, I think PAM is long overdue to be part of Slackware so it can begin to make itself more useful again as an extremely robust distribution with easy integration.

I may be wrong with my line of thinking, but the lack of PAM prevents me from deploying my favorite distribution of all-time to be used with all of my servers.

Right now, I have a mixture of FreeBSD, OpenSuSE and Slackware, but the Slack servers are doing menial tasks.